[packagekit] PackageKit Collections.

[Anders F Björklund]

Tim Lauridsen wrote:

> The idea was to handle the yum groups as metapackages shown in the gui
> in a special 'Collections' group.
>
> if you select the Collection you will see all yum comps groups as
> metapackages there can be install/removed/updated.

Aside: I thought the term 'Collections' in Fedora meant releases ?
Like shown in https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/collections/

And that the other thing was called either "Comps" or "Yum Groups"
(as apart from the regular "RPM Groups", which is something else)

> In the api installPackages etc are extended to handle meta packages
>
> ä meta package id is just like an normal package id but with a special
> keyword instead of a repoid. it could be [meta] or ~meta.
>
> if a backend dont support this then it just dont return any members  
> for
> the collection group (GROUP_META_PACKAGES).

I've set up Smart* to parse the "comps.xml" repodata into metapackages.
(Other channel/package types already have real metapackages instead...)

* see https://launchpad.net/~afb/smart/groups

It will create one metapackage per group, and add packages as Requires.
So for instance the XFCE yum group will be added as a prefixed package:

Name: ^xfce-desktop
Version: 0 at noarch
Priority: 0
Group: Virtual/Desktop Environments
Installed Size: Unknown
Reference URLs:
Flags:
Channels: Fedora 9 - i386
Summary: XFCE
Description:
  A lightweight desktop environment that works well on low end machines.

The prefix (^) was needed to avoid collisions between metapackages
and regular packages for things like "mysql" or other common names.

There is similar code to add metapackages from openSUSE "patterns":
http://en.opensuse.org/Standards/YaST2_Repository_Metadata/pattern


The Smart backend for PackageKit hasn't yet been modified to look
in metapackage requirements for any "overrides" to the RPM groups.

i.e. the RPM packages will still sort according to their RPM Group,
and not according to where they appear in the Yum Groups / comps.

--anders